Sony’s new mid-range Xperia L1 launches with 5.5-inch screen

Sony, fresh from its MWC 2017 showing where it launched a range of new handsets, has just announced another new phone in the form of the Xperia L1.

It’s a less powerful offering than the Xperia XZ Premium, launched at MWC, but it does come with a big 5.5-inch 720p display, if you like your phone verging on phablet size.

Set for a late-April release, the Xperia L1 will likely come with an affordable price tag, or “accessible price point,” as Sony puts it, and will be arriving in the UK and across select markets in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The phone looks to be Sony’s attempt to crack the mid to low-range market, coming with some distinctly middling hardware under the hood.

First up, there’s the 1.45GHz quad-core MediaTek chipset, which sits alongside 2GB of RAM and a pretty meagre 16GB of storage – though, there is a microSD card slot which means you can expand the memory up to 256GB.

There’s also support for 4G and NFC, and the L1 will run on the latest Android 7.0 Nougat, which should provide speedy enough performance when coupled with the MediaTek chip.

In terms of design, the Xperia L1 doesn’t bring much flair to the table, coming in a 151 x 74 x 8.7mm body either black, white, or pink colour options.

Round the back you’ll find the 13-megapixel f/2.2 aperture rear camera, with a 5-megapixel wide-angle offering for the selfie shooter. Of course, there’s no way to tell how the camera performs at this stage, but expect mid-range results.

The battery comes in the form of a 2,620mAh cell with Qnovo adaptive charging, which means it should save your battery from degrading too quickly by monitoring the condition of the battery and adjusting the current accordingly every time you plug it in.

And speaking of plugging it in, the USB Type-C port is a nice addition which lends the phone an element of future-proofing.

As of this point, there’s no official pricing details, but the promise of an “accessible price point” bodes well for the phone’s success based on the specs.

Let us know what you think of the Xperia L1 in the comments.

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